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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirPublisher's Note: Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists.In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects?food and drink?she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.Comment: This is a stub entry. Please add your comments below to help us expand it
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Added by: Berta GrimauSummary: This article provides the basics of a typical logic, sometimes called 'classical elementary logic' or 'classical first-order logic', in a rigorous yet accessible manner. Section 2 develops a formal language, with a syntax and grammar. Section 3 sets up a deductive system for the language, in the spirit of natural deduction. Section 4 provides a model-theoretic semantics. Section 5 turns to the relationships between the deductive system and the semantics, and in particular, the relationship between derivability and validity. The authors show that an argument is derivable only if it is valid (soundness). Then they establish a converse: that an argument is valid only if it is derivable (completeness). They also briefly indicate other features of the logic, some of which are corollaries to soundness and completeness. The final section, Section 6, is devoted to a brief examination of the philosophical position that classical logic is 'the one right logic'.Comment: This article introduces all the necessary tools in order to understand both the proof-theoretic and the model-theoretic aspects of first-order classical logical consequence. As such it can be used as a main reading in an introductory logic course covering classical first-order logic (assuming the students will have already looked at classical propositional logic). Moreover, the article covers some metatheoretic results (soundness, completeness, compactness, upward and downward Löwenheim-Skolem), which makes it suitable as a reading for a slightly more advanced course in logic. Finally, the article includes a brief incursion into the topic of logical pluralism. This makes it suitable to be used in a course on non-classical logics with an introduction module on classical logic.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
This paper presents a new view of logical pluralism. This pluralism takes into account how the logical connectives shift, depending on the context in which they occur. Using the Question-Under-Discussion Framework as formulated by Craige Roberts, I identify the contextual factor that is responsible for this shift. I then provide an account of the meanings of the logical connectives which can accommodate this factor. Finally, I suggest that this new pluralism has a certain Carnapian flavour. Questions about the meanings of the connectives or the best logic outside of a specified context are not legitimate questions.
Comment: Can serve as an example of logical pluralism in any philosophy of logic course. Familiarity with the pluralisms of Shapiro and Carnap is helpful for comparison, but is not technically required.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one right logic. A particular version of the view, what is sometimes called domain-specific logical pluralism, has it that the right logic and connectives depend somehow on the domain of use, or context of use, or the linguistic framework. This type of view has a problem with cross-framework communication, though: it seems that all such communication turns into merely verbal disputes. If two people approach the same domain with different logics as their guide, then they may be using different connectives, and hence talking past each other. In this situation, if we think we are having a conversation about “ ¬ A”, but are using different “ ¬ ”s, then we are not really talking about the same thing. The communication problem prevents legitimate disagreements about logic, which is a bad result. In this paper I articulate a possible solution to this problem, without giving up pluralism, which requires adopting a notion of metalinguistic negotiation, and allows people to communicate and disagree across domains/contexts/frameworks.
Comment: Fit for any philosophy of logic course touching on either logical disagreement or logical pluralism. Given the short length, it may be naturally paired with a paper attacking logical pluralism as a mere verbal dispute. There are no particular prerequisites, although familiarity with at least one kind of domain-specific pluralism is helpful for context.
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Added by: Andrea Blomqvist, Contributed by: Rory WilsonIntroduction: In increasing numbers, philosophers are coming to read Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1997, hereafter EPM) as having dealt the definitive death blow to the idea that inner states with epistemic authority could have this authority immediately. EPM purportedly proves that instead, such states necessarily show up already embedded within a web of inferentially articulated conceptual knowledge, and that in order for this to be possible, the epistemic subject must be a negotiator of a normative space in which standards of justification and correctness are already recognized. [...] In this paper I will attempt to show that Sellars' mythical explanations in EPM employ a very specific and rhetorically complex methodology, and likewise that we will not be in a position to critically assess the paper's arguments unless we give careful attention to its overall textual structure and to the nature of the mythical explanations it employs.Comment: A companion to Sellars' ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ for students more inclined to social philosophy.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: Several accounts of representation in cognitive systems have recently been proposed. These look for a theory that will establish how a representation comes to have a certain content, and how these representations are used by cognitive systems. Covariation accounts are unsatisfactory, as they make intelligent reasoning and cognition impossible. Cummins' interpretation-based account cannot explain the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, nor how certain cognitive representations appear to have intrinsic meaning. Cognitive systems can be defined as model-constructers, or systems that use information from interpreted models as arguments in the functions they execute. An account based on this definition solves many of the problems raised by the earlier proposals
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Added by: Maria Jimena Clavel VazquezAbstract:
This paper takes a new look at an old question: what is the human self? It offers a proposal for theorizing the self from an enactive perspective as an autonomous system that is constituted through interpersonal relations. It addresses a prevalent issue in the philosophy of cognitive science: the body-social problem. Embodied and social approaches to cognitive identity are in mutual tension. On the one hand, embodied cognitive science risks a new form of methodological individualism, implying a dichotomy not between the outside world of objects and the brain-bound individual but rather between body-bound individuals and the outside social world. On the other hand, approaches that emphasize the constitutive relevance of social interaction processes for cognitive identity run the risk of losing the individual in the interaction dynamics and of downplaying the role of embodiment. This paper adopts a middle way and outlines an enactive approach to individuation that is neither individualistic nor disembodied but integrates both approaches. Elaborating on Jonas' notion of needful freedom it outlines an enactive proposal to understanding the self as co-generated in interactions and relations with others. I argue that the human self is a social existence that is organized in terms of a back and forth between social distinction and participation processes. On this view, the body, rather than being identical with the social self, becomes its mediator.Comment: available in this Blueprint
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Added by: Laura JimenezSummary: This is the fifth chapter of the book Philosophy and the Sciences for Everyone. The chapter explores scientific interpretations of how our minds evolved, and some of the methodologies used in forming these interpretations. It relates evolutionary debates to a core issue in the philosophy of mind, namely, whether all knowledge comes from experience, or whether we have 'inborn' knowledge about certain aspects of our world.Comment: Good introduction to evolutionary psychology and the debate about nativism for undergraduate students. It looks at examples coming from ecology such as beaver colonies to understand how the human mind might have adapted to solve specific tasks that our ancestors faced. It is the first chapter of the book dedicated to the philosophy of cognitive sciences. Useful in philosophy of science or philosophy of mind courses.
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Added by: Nick NovelliAbstract: Philosophers and psychologists have often maintained that in order to attribute mental states to other people one must have a 'theory of mind'. This theory facilitates our grasp of other people's mental states. Debate has then focussed on the form this theory should take. Recently a new approach has been suggested, which I call the 'Direct Perception approach to social cognition'. This approach maintains that we can directly perceive other people's mental states. It opposes traditional views on two counts: by claiming that mental states are observable and by claiming that we can attribute them to others without the need for a theory of mind. This paper argues that there are two readings of the direct perception claims: a strong and a weak one. The Theory-theory is compatible with the weak version but not the strong one. The paper argues that the strong version of direct perception is untenable, drawing on evidence from the mirror neuron literature and arguments from the philosophy of science and perception to support this claim. It suggests that one traditional 'theory of mind' view, the 'Theory-theory' view, is compatible with the claim that mental states are observable, and concludes that direct perception views do not offer a viable alternative to theory of mind approaches to social cognition.Comment: A good argument against direct perception as an alternative to theory theory. Since the direct perception theory is somewhat trendy, this paper would be a useful counterpoint in philosophy of mind courses.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Matthew ClemensAbstract: In this paper I examine some research on how to diminish or eliminate stereotype threat in mathematics. Some of the successful strategies include: informing our students about stereotype threat, challenging the idea that logical intelligence is an 'innate' ability, making students In threatened groups feel welcomed, and introducing counter-stereotypical role models. The purpose of this paper is to take these strategies that have proven successful and come up with specific ways to incorporate them into introductory logic classes. For example, the possible benefit of presenting logic to our undergraduate students by concentrating on aspects of logic that do not result in a clash of schemas.Comment: A very accessible paper, requiring virtually no previous knowledge of logic or feminist philosophy. It is particularly appropriate for the "logic" session of a course on teaching philosophy. It can also be proposed as a preliminary reading for an intro to Logic course, insofar as knowledge of the interaction between stereotype threat and logic performance can have a positive effect on the performance of those potentially affected (as argued in the paper itself).